


Good For You

by kusege



Category: Be More Chill - Iconis/Tracz
Genre: Angst, Callout Post for Jeremy Heere, Death, Drowning, F/M, How It Should Have Ended: BMC, Hurt No Comfort, One Shot, Panic Attacks, Self-Hatred, Suicidal Thoughts, does this count as self-deprication?, hoo boy it's about to go down, refrences dear evan hansen i guess, self-deprication
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-21
Updated: 2018-01-21
Packaged: 2019-03-07 12:33:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13434813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kusege/pseuds/kusege
Summary: Sometimes, you don't get a dream come true.Inspired by Good For You from Dear Evan Hansen





	Good For You

**Author's Note:**

> Content Warnings: drowning, suicide ideation, death
> 
> Enjoy!

Jeremy had been let out of the hospital, and he still hadn’t seen Michael yet. He needed to see Michael. He needed to apologize better, in a calm environment, for everything, not just one shouted word in the heat of a fight backstage at a play. Still a little shaky on his legs after being in a coma for 3 days, he walks to Michael’s house. (He always skips the first half of Mondays.)

When he stands in front of the door, he isn’t sure what to do. He was always free to just walk right in- hell, Michael even gave him a key to his house that stayed on his keyring somehow, even through it all- but things are different now. Michael wasn’t waiting for him at the hospital, Michael had gotten attacked at the play, Michael had looked so, so angry in the bathroom and so, so destroyed when Jeremy walked away...

It wasn’t hard to connect the dots.

He knocks and waits. There’s no response. He knocks more forcefully. Nothing. He knocks in a pattern, created in their shared childhood, three in quick succession, then two more slowly, then another two even closer together than the first three.

This time, he hears someone walking over to the door, and then they open it, and then there’s Michael. He looks down at Jeremy, scowling. “Oh, it’s you,” he mutters.

“M-Michael,” Jeremy says, trying to convey everything he wants to say into his name. Michael’s expression doesn’t change. “Listen, I, uh, I need to explain-“

“No you don’t,” Michael responds, tone scathing. “I understand, Jeremy. You needed something more than just one loser, stoner friend. I totally get it.”

“N-no, I, that’s-“

“I mean, yeah, it hurt a little to watch, but really, I’m proud!” Michael says with a smile and a happiness that is clearly fake. “You, going and getting friends, getting a girl to fall in love with you, and all you needed was a $400 mint-flavored supercomputer and a little less me! I just couldn’t provide a good enough anything for you! I get it! Go! You’re free now!” Tears are beading up in Michael’s eyes now.

“M-Michael, I, that isn’t true!” Jeremy rushes out, desperate to make him stop. Michael does, crossing his arms and frowning as he does.

“Just leave.”

“W-what?” No, he can’t be hearing this, Michael is his Player One, always by his side, they’d proved that at the play, he couldn’t be kicking Jeremy out, he couldn’t, he couldn’t...

“Just go, get to school, you’re gonna be late, you know. Hey!” Michael shouts. “Maybe you can go talk to Christine! Get her to go on a date with you, yknow, after all that effort it’d be a waste not to at least ask her out! I’m sure she’ll say yes! It’ll be all you ever wanted!”

“I-“

“No.” Michael says, coldly, and slams the door in his face, leaving Jeremy and all his unspoken apologies out in the November cold. 

Maybe he should just go to school, talk to Christine, see where he stood with her. There was a chance, after all, right? That she wouldn’t hate him? That she’d say yes? Michael thought so, so...

Jeremy turns and begins to walk towards the school.

______

“Of course not.”

Huh? Wait, okay, sure, he was kinda expecting this, but Michael had said...

“I, just, god, Jeremy!” Christine shouts, standing up and putting her hands on his shoulders so he can’t escape. “You drugged me! No, you drugged the entire cast! Are you even sorry? That is seriously not okay!”

“I-I didn’t want to! Jenna was the one who spiked the Mt. Dew at the play, not me! I decided against it!” He stutters out, terrified of the hatred written across her face.

Christine’s face looks even more disgusted, if that’s possible. “Oh, you decided against it? When, after I said I didn’t want one? Is that what it took to realize drugging the entire school with illegal supercomputer pills from Japan so that people would like you was maybe _not_ a totally fine thing to do? Are you _that selfish_ and _that desperate?_ ” She laughs bitterly.

She’s right, of course, Jeremy is horrible and selfish and disgusting, but he’s _sorry_. “I.... I’m so sorry, Christine.”

She stares down at him, nose wrinkling as if she smells something atrocious. She steps away from him. “Get the fuck out,” she orders, and Jeremy scrambles out of his seat.

He runs into a hallway, takes a turn or two, and then a few more, just trying to get away, and then he goes through a door, and then he’s out behind the school. Uncertain of where to go, Jeremy walks until he reaches Brooke’s favorite spot, a crude wooden bench, some past student’s project, mostly surrounded by saplings. He sits down and takes a moment to breathe, pressing his hands against his face as if they’ll provide a barrier from the world and everything he’s done.

Someone coughs, and Jeremy looks up, and Brooke is standing in front of him, tapping her foot. She’s been crying.

“O-Hey, Brooke,” he says, awkward. She glares at him in response. 

“You know, you could have at least broken up with me properly,” she bites out.

“W-huh?” he stammers out.

“Y’know,” she says, beginning to circle him now, “instead of just going off and fucking Chloe at a party.”

Oh. _Shit_ , he hadn’t even thought about what he would say to Brooke about that.

“Brooke, I, I, I didn’t-“

“I mean, I get it, right? You wanted Chloe the whole time, and I was just close to her, so eventually you’d get her, yeah?” she asks, her voice cutting through him. It’s so close to what his actual plan was, just swap one C name for another and redefine close personally to close on the social ladder, and....

“No, it, it wasn’t, that’s not-“

“I mean, you aren’t special!” Brooke shouts. “That’s already happened to me, three times now! You think I’d be used to getting left behind, but nope! It crushes me, every time!”

Jeremy stands up, thinking to comfort her, or maybe run, but as he does, someone throws a bottlecap at him. When he turns around, the bench and the trees and the school are all gone and he is standing in a completely black void. Michael is there, right behind him, holding a bottle of Red carelessly, dangling it between his fingertips.

“Don’t worry, Jeremy,” he bites out. “I won’t be sticking around to weigh you down anymore. I’ll just... let you go.” As he says that, he drops the Red, which crashes at Jeremy’s feet. The old soda sprays out onto the invisible ground, and then continues to pour out in a seemingly endless, constantly increasing stream. Michael steps back so it won’t stain his shoes.

Then, he senses someone just behind him again, so he turns, and there’s Christine, glaring at him. “Well done ruining theater for me, Jeremy,” she mutters before shoving him. His back hits a sudden wall, which he turns around to find as one of four glass walls on the sides of him. He looks up to find another above him, and there’s glass below him, too. 

He’s in a tank.

“I guess you’ll run the shows now!” Christine shouts, her voice unmuffled despite the glass. The Mountain Dew Red is in the tank, now completely covering Jeremy’s old Converse, probably staining them.

“Is this what you wanted?” Brooke asks, to his left. The soda is rising surprisingly fast, now halfway up his calves. His pants are sticking to him. His shoes are full of Mountain Dew now, weighing them down like they're made of lead.

“Was it worth it?” Michael asks, to his right. The soda has reached his knees. He’s starting to smell it, the antique carbonation and the aged, overpowering stench of orange juice and red #40 making him dizzy.

“Are you happy now?” Christine asks, behind him now, so he has to turn his head to see her hate-filled glare. The soda’s to his hips. He starts pounding on the glass, looking for a way out. The three people outside the tank begin to smirk at his noticeable distress. 

“Help!” he shouts desperately, looking around. He can’t see anything except the void, and the tank, and his three friends- “We aren’t your friends,” Michael says as soon as he has the thought, and Michael’s right, he’s always right- the three people watching on, somewhere between amused and bored, and the toxic-smelling Mountain Dew Red, now at chest level. He starts to float in it.

Then, he sees something emerging from the void, glowing a ghastly cyan light, and-

“No,” Jeremy gasps. “No, not you, please, anything but you.” The SQUIP, hovering in front of him, merely smirks. The soda reaches Jeremy’s neck, and his head hits the top of the tank. He desperately looks to the others for help, but they just glare at him, whispering. 

“I hate him.”

“Worthless.”

“Disgusting.”

The soda covers his mouth, then his nose. Jeremy keeps desperately pounding on the glass, but it shows no signs of cracking. He tilts his head up to take in one last breath of air. They continue.

“He sucks.”

“Failure.”

“Horrible.”

The soda completely covers him. Jeremy can’t breathe. He’s drowning now, in stinking, discontinued Mountain Dew from the 80s. 

“Traitor.”

“Cheater.”

“Ruins everything.”

He looks down at the people watching him die, don’t they care? They don’t seem to, staring up at him hatefully.

“I wish he’d die.”

“He should die.”

“You should die.”

 _I should die_ , he thinks. His vision begins to fill with little black starbursts, and panicking, he inhales, and begins to choke on the soda he stupidly tried to breathe. _I should die_ , he thinks again.

“You should die.”

“You should die.”

“You should die.”

He looks down for help one last desperate time, but is only met with four pairs of glaring, glowing, bright blue eyes.

“You should die.”

_I should die._

And he does.

______

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jeremy wakes up, shaking, coughing, tears rolling down his cheeks. _It was a dream_ , some part of him thinks, but it doesn’t seem to get through to the rest of him, probably because it’s busy having a panic attack. He’s not sure how long he sits at his desk, shuddering and struggling to breathe. He just knows that, eventually, the door to his History classroom opens. Rich enters, looking worried.

He asks Jeremy what happened, tries to help him up, but he just waves away Rich’s hands and manages to mutter something about an anxiety attack.

Rich doesn’t seem to buy it, but he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he pulls out his phone and shoots off a quick text. Jeremy’s phone buzzes in his pocket and, pulling it out with one slightly shaking hand, he sees he’s in a groupchat. They’ve been looking for him for 40 minutes. School ended almost an hour ago. He has 93 unread texts. 45 of them are from Christine. 

As Jeremy forces his breathing to slow, flexes his fingers a few times in an attempt to dispel the buzzy feeling in them, and sips from Rich's water bottle, the groupchat lights up. He can’t bring himself to see what they’re saying. He’s just gotten the sick feeling in his stomach down to a manageable level when Michael comes into the room. Michael, too, tries to push Jeremy to tell him what happened, but he just says the same lie about an anxiety attack, this time adding that it happened on his way back to grab his forgotten notebook. Michael looks skeptical, but he doesn’t say anything to convey that he might not believe him. He just waits for Jeremy to stand, a bit shaky, but standing nonetheless, and walks out of the classroom with him. They’re still a bit awkward; it’s only his second day out of the hospital, after all.

Jeremy resolves not to mention the dream to anyone. No one needs to deal with his problems. They’ve got enough as it is.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't really know what to say about this, except that I got an idea for a BMC version of Good For You and I don't have the patience to make an animatic, so this happened instead.
> 
> Just to clarify: everything still happened the same way it did in the actual musical. Jeremy's brain just made up the 'Michael didn't visit me' and 'Christine said no to dating me' stuff.
> 
> Anyway, feel free to throw kudos and comments at this, since I am powered entirely by other people's validation.


End file.
